Twelve Fantastic Features You Need to Know about Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 is Microsoft's latest upgrade to their workhorse server platform and the changes and upgrades are significant. From an industry-leading hypervisor, superior management capabilities and more flexible and resilient storage, Server 2012 will help lead the way into the next decade of Microsoft technologies. Read on to learn more about this key technology foundation and how it will simplify and improve delivery of your organization's IT services.

The latest, and perhaps the most significant version of Windows Server was released in September 2012. What makes this release so significant is not just the new interface and default installation, but the enhanced Windows PowerShell, support for new hardware (which means increased performance, reliability, scalability, security, and storage options). The new virtualization enhancements have greatly increased not only the scalability of Hyper-V but performance and enterprise adoptability as well. In short, Windows Server 2012 helps you transform your IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value has hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, and more.

PowerShell is a command-line scripting language used for administration and management of Windows Server 2012 (as well as other products such as Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, SQL, and System Center). PowerShell enables IT professionals to control, automate, and perform bulk administration of Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows. Windows PowerShell 3.0 is backwards-compatible with PowerShell 2.0 and its associated cmdlets. Some of the new windows features in PowerShell include:

Disconnected Sessions. These are user-managed, persistent sessions (PSSessions) that are created by using the New-PSSession cmdlet. The PSSessions are saved on the remote computer and are no long dependent on the session in which they were created.

Module Auto-Loading. All functions and modules that are installed on the computer will be loaded even if the module is not imported into the current session.

PowerShell ISE. Features include auto-save, block copy, brace-matching, Intellisense, recent items list, Showcommand window, support for writing Windows PowerShell script workflows, and a unified Console Pane.

Updatable Help System. You can use the Update-Help cmdlet to identify, download, unpack ad validate new help files from the internet.

Windows PowerShell Workflow. Windows PowerShell workflows are sequences of administrative or management actions that can be applied against multiple computers. These actions can be frequent, long-running, repeatable and uninterruptible. Users and administrators can write workflows in XAML.

Windows PowerShell Web Access. Administrators and users can run PowerShell commands and scripts in a web-based console.

Hyper-V (or Hypervisor) enables you to create a virtualized server computing environment. Virtualization with Hyper-V enables you to improve the efficiency of your computing resources by utilizing more of your hardware resources. Hyper-V was first released with Server 2008 and has seen substantial improvements ever since. Windows Server 2012 introduces several new and greatly enhanced features that puts in on par with the best hypervisors available.

Hyper-V on Windows
Server 2012

Hyper-V on Windows
Server 2008 R2

Active Virtual Guests per host

Virtual CPUs per virtual guest session

Maximum number of nodes in a cluster

Table 1. Scalability in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Hyper-V Replica provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines (VMs) from a Hyper-V host or cluster to a remote Hyper-V host or cluster to provide business continuity and fail-over recovery. This new, built-in feature tracks write operations on the source Host or cluster and replicates them to the destination host or cluster so that both VMs are in constant lockstep. If the local VM fails (or if an administrator manually fails-over) the remote replica assumes its place. All of this happens without having any specialized storage or networking hardware requirements.

VHDX Disk. The VHDX disk format is new to Hyper-V 3 and adds new capabilities and enhancements over previous versions:

A VHDX virtual hard disk can be as large as 64 TB.
Support for larger block sizes in VHDX virtual disks. This provides support for dynamic and differential disks, which in turn, allows for lets these disks attune to the needs of the workload.
A 4-KB logical sector virtual disk for applications and workloads that support 4KB sectors.
Conversion from a VHD to VHDX and back.

Live Migration is now built into Windows Server 2012 (whereas before, you only had this capability when you used System Center Virtual Machine Manager with Quick Storage Migration). Live Migration in Windows Server 2012 enables an administrator to migrate live VMs between stand-alone Hyper-V 3 hosts without requiring the use of any shared storage. The benefit of this is that the VMs can be moved while keeping the VMs online and available to clients, thus ensuring no downtime. You can perform a live migration through a GUI interface or through a PowerShell cmdlet.

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